Quotes from Stewart Butterfield

We'd never make Slack an email client, but it's good to support sending emails into it. There's quite a bit of formatting you can do. When I get an email from the outside world that I want to share with team, I cut and paste it into Slack. But really, I should be able to import that email as an object.

We created materials to explain Slack to individuals - what it was for, how it worked, what you're supposed to do - but we also built resources for team administrators. We wanted to give them ammunition to help convince the team.

If you work at a 10,000-person company, and you're using e-mail as the primary means of communication, then you probably have access to a couple hundredths of 1 percent of all the communications happening across the company. But if you use Slack, you might have access to 10 or 20 percent.

The social use of Slack does drive awareness - it's a good thing for us.

For the first five years of my life, I grew up in a log cabin in coastal British Columbia in a very small town, like 300 people, mostly hippies. No running water, no electricity. When I was 12, I changed my name from Dharma to Stewart. At that age, you just want to be normal.

If one engineer at a startup tries Slack and says, 'I hate it. I am not going to use this,' that's it for us. We won't get evaluated.

In software design, it's all about making a guess, trying it, and then learning from the experience.

One of the biggest lessons I've learned is that there has got to be a reason for what you're doing. You actually have to care about what you're doing. The business has to be about something. Whatever the point of it is does not have to be inconsistent with making money, but usually if that's the sole reason, it is not very successful.

The experience of being able to search back over all your team's communications for, in our case, millions of messages, is super-valuable. But you don't know what that's like until you actually have it.

Email is the lowest common denominator. It's the way you get communications from one person to another. There isn't really an alternative. Sometimes people will have Facebook messenger turned on, but 99 percent of the time, if you're sending a message to a human you don't know well, you're using email.

What motivates me is just to do a really, really good job at something. If I were a better musician, I probably would've ended up as one.

The scale of revenue growth is unprecedented. If you look back over history, whether you're looking at the railway robber baron era or the 1920s or the '50s or the '70s, it used to take a long time for a company to get to the point where they had tens of millions of dollars of revenue. It was almost never an overnight phenomenon.

We're still at the beginning of a major transition in how people communicate and work together.

The useful part of Microsoft was that everything worked together.

Hard numbers tell an important story; user stats and sales numbers will always be key metrics. But every day, your users are sharing a huge amount of qualitative data, too - and a lot of companies either don't know how or forget to act on it.

There was a lot of dialogue between the people who were developing Flickr and their users to get feedback on how they wanted Flickr to develop. That interaction made the initial community very strong, and then that seed was there for new people who joined to make the community experience strong for them, too.

You may be trying to drive in a particular direction that people don't necessarily understand at first. In our case, we knew the users we had in mind for this product. So in the early days, we looked at our customers, really just testers at that point, and we paid extra attention to the teams we knew should be using Slack successfully.

There's a lot that's wrong with the way we work - bad habits that develop around control of information, people hoarding information as a means of preserving their own power. When you're using Slack, everyone can see what's going on because the default mode is public.

Silicon Valley is the engine for wealth creation. They've displaced energy, they've displaced financial services, and if we don't start including a broader array of people in that, the same group of people is going to rise to the top.

Life is too short to do mediocre work and it is definitely too short to build shitty things.

I think email's going to be around for, like, another 10,000 years. It's a great way to cross organizational boundaries.

I love cities. New York, Montreal, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto, L.A... but, I do choose to live in Vancouver. It's home.

I think we are reluctant to move people out of an organization when there is not a good fit. It is typically not because someone is stupid or lazy or incompetent; it is a lot more subtle than that.

We sent our user research team out to sit with customers for periods of time and get some insight into how Slack is working. We also get tens of thousands of points of contact via Twitter and our customer support ticketing system every month and can synthesize those results.